When I consider how badly the movie could have misfired, turning the entire concept into a comedy like the 21 Jump Street and Starsky and Hutch films, or simply a limp remake like Get Smart, I realize we dodged not a bullet but a howitzer shell. Guy Ritchie treated the material as well or better than he did the Sherlock Holmes canon in the Robert Downey Jr. films.

When I was a kid, during the TV show's original run, small tailor shops on the East Side would put signs on their doors stating that they were not U.N.C.L.E.'s front.

FYI: "East Side" is the formal name of the neighborhood in Manhattan where things like U.N.C.L.E. headquarters and The United Nations are located.

Ha! Another example of how the show got into people's brains back then. I recall an article in TV Guide in '66 or '67 referring to the show as "The Mystic Cult of Millions": It was the first media fandom, preceding and smoothing the way for the fandom of Star Trek. In its time MfU was the most famous TV show in the world.

The 2015 film clicks whether you were a fan then or since, or not at all. If the screenwriters had called the main characters "Robert Devlin" and "Sergei P. Chekhov," for example, the story would still work.